STO313

Student’s Name Course Professor’s Name University City (State) Date PART A: CASE STUDY DESCRIPTION Brief Background The case study, “Retail Banking Market Investigation”, is focused on examining the strategic approach and challenges experienced by Metro Bank in the United Kingdom (UK). In the year 2010, Metro Bank came into existence as newly penetrated high-street bank in the UK. The company initiated the servicescape by offering range of retail banking facilities to the personal and business consumers. The business consumers included Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that require primary funds from banks in order to manage the corporate financials throughout a fiscal period. By the end of 2014, Metro Bank expanded its customer accounts to 447,000, which were marked at 8,912 in 2010. Through the deployment of a mass-market strategy of business penetration and rapid growth in the British consumer market, Metro Bank declared of owning more than 200 branches nationwide by the end of fiscal year 2020 (CMA, 2015). Primarily, the initial focus of Metro Bank was the consumers and businesses present in London. Based on a rational servicescape of deposit-taking and lending institution, Metro Bank anticipated success from London by providing utmost convenience and excellent customer service experience, before expanding business networks throughout the UK. Through convenience and customer service excellence, Metro Bank had a remarkable opportunity to accomplish sustainability in early stages and provide audience with an availability of easy banking choice (CMA, 2015). However, the company experienced few strategic challenges over the period, which requires retrenchment solutions for overcoming the growth obstacles while distributing the servicescape significantly. Discussion Strategic Problems The primary strategic problem experienced by Metro Bank was related to the business entry in the British consumer market. According to Levine, Bernard and Nagel (2017), barriers to entry is a primary challenge experienced by newly formed businesses, particularly in the service market. The barriers to entry require businesses to utilize strategic intelligence and allocate resources for avoiding unnecessary operational halts. In the case of Metro Bank, acquisition of banking license was a critical challenge during the market entry level. Over the century, the British government avoided providing authorization to the newly formed banks and ensured that Financial Services Authority (FSA) is navigating the operations at a gradual pace (CMA, 2015). Considering the inclining competition in the banking sector, Metro Bank had a noticeable challenge in the early stages. The probability of altered business approaches and objectives was higher as compared to existing competitors in the sector. Besides, the involvement of FSA weakened the control of governance bodies over the desired strategies significantly. The second strategic challenge encountered by the Metro Bank was during the expansion of business networks. As specified by Meijer (2015), business expansion denotes the proactive and strategic developments within an organization based on the changing market dynamics. Similarly, Verbeke and Asmussen (2016) stated that the expansion strategies are n...